Whole lotta not-picking goin' on

I'd wanted to try out my new yarn picker today. I've got wool all washed and ready to go. I had the day off.
But.
The day just got jam-packed.
We butchered a couple of chickens this morning, Madman and I. The original plan was to do the remaining 10, but none of our helpers (i.e. amateur chicken-pluckers) could come and help today. So we tackled what we could handle, given how many other projects we had for the day.
Then we put 24 pounds of elderberries in the freezer. (Woohoo! Free fruit!) I would have taken pictures, but it's the same process as last year. Forks, fruit, bowls. Berries ricocheting all over the kitchen. After the first couple of hours, the fun starts to wear off...
We didn't start any wine, yet, but we will. In the meantime, the freezer is holding the elderberries for us, and, as a by-product, doing the mashing for us as well. (The formation of ice crystals within the berries smashes the heck out of them. Does a much better job than we could ever do with a potato masher.)
I butched the basil, since now that it's almost September, we could get a frost at any time. (Gotta love Zone 3. *sigh*) I made 3 batches of pesto, 2 of which went into the freezer. I filled icecube trays with the glorious green stuff - I'll bag up the individual cubes once they're frozen solid. Perfect little portions to add to pasta or soup, come winter. (So our ice cubes will taste a little funny for awhile. Big deal.)
And somewhere in between all this, I managed to bake a loaf of bread.
Madman picked beans while I was picking basil. We ate some for supper, but the rest went into the fridge, since we'd completely run out of steam by then. Tomorrow is another day.
And the rest of supper? The Second Annual first pestodilla of the season - homegrown tomatoes and homemade pesto. Life is good...

Yes, words do bite.

But first, a basket. The class I'll be teaching is a beginner's class, so I wanted a simple basket that would cover the basics: an open-weave bottom, plain plaited sides, and a simple wrapped rim. I made this one for the class sample:(Clothespins included for scale. And because they're what I use for clamps (best cheap craft clamps ever!) so they happened to be nearby.)
And the semi-side view:

The only thing I didn't do while it was still wet, that I really should have done, was to burn off the "hairs" - little fibery bits from the reed that stick out here and there.

But given how late it was, and how tired I was, and how crappy I felt, it seemed like a remarkably poor idea to start playing with open flames. I'll resoak the basket at a later date, and burn them off then. (Getting the basket wet reduces the risk of setting fire to it. Go figure.)

Oh, the post title?
I had a feeling that the last words of this post would come back and bite me on the ass...
Yes. I'm sick. Madman had a head cold a week or so ago that he passed on to me, but my version is a combination head and chest cold. One or the other would have been sufficient. Both at once is beating the crap out of me. I've been taking the elderberry syrup, and I think it's helping. (Which is actually scary; if this bad is 'better', imagine how truly bad I'd feel without it...)
Tomorrow is my day off. I had all kinds of plans, but I think my new plan is to wrap up in a quilt and lay on the couch. A friend at work loaned me season 4 of Lost, I have plenty of knitting, and lots and lots of elderberry cough syrup.
Now all I need is a truckload of tissues.

Wine, Knittin', and Wrong (Only because that one was easier to come up with something than Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax, Cabbages and Kings)

The elderberry wine is happily bubbling away in its carboy. When a sufficiency of sediment has settled out, we'll re-rack it, then re-rack again if more sediment presents. Then into bottles it will go, corking will commence, and the wine will be laid down to age. Sometime around this time next year, we'll be tasting it. Then, and only then, will we know if we screwed it up or if we produced a wonder.

The ugly pillowcase that was sacrificed is now a new and terribly interesting color. It's still ugly, but it's now a prettier ugly.

Madman decided to re-pitch yeast in the mead and add some honey. (His avocation is beermaking, so I defer to him in all things brew-y. We are both masters of yeast - I bake, he brews, and life is eternally good.)
(Just as an aside, we hauled out the mead carboy at around 9am yesterday. After looking, and smelling, we decided to taste. He siphoned out a good sample, we tasted and tasted. "Hmmm... Not bad..." "Much better than the last time we tasted it." "Is there alcohol left in here, ya think?" "I think there is! Here, have another taste." Is it decadent to be sampling mead at 9oclock of a Sunday morning?)

I ripped out the failed swatch, shifted down a needle size, and cast on again, with one less repeat of the pattern stitch. I've got this much done. Help me now pretend I don't see a rather large mistake on the left side...

I said, we're ignoring that...
*Sigh*
So, if for every repeat of a diamond, I have to rip back half a diamond, how many repeats will I have to knit before
a) I finish the scarf, or
b) I commit hara-kiri with a set of size 00 dpns.

.

Sundays are for Busy

It's a typical fall day in Vermont - cold and rainy, wet and miserable.
So Madman and I played indoors instead of outside.
Today was the day for straining off the gooshy fruit from the elderberry wine.
We sacrificed an ugly pillowcase to the cause.
We used it to line another 5gallon bucket, dumped in the elderberry goosh, and tied it up.


Then we hung it high:
It took a little adjusting to get the string length just right. Too long, and the bag dipped into the surface of the wine. Too short, and the corners of the pillowcase stuck out and dripped on the outside of the bucket. (Note to self: next time sew the corners to box up the bottom of the pillowcase. No corners = no problem.)
It was fun for the next few hours, listening to the dripping. At times it was playing a merry little tune that made us both smile.
We dragged out a glass carboy that held a long neglected batch of Apple Ginger Honey Mead that I had made a zillion or so years ago, that we thought had failed. We figured we'd dump it so we could use the carboy for our new efforts.

But it looks good... And it smells good (not so listerine-y as it did when it was younger.) As an experiment, Madman put a fresh airlock on it and actually got a bubble.
Scratch the plan to dump it. We might re-pitch yeast, add a little more honey, and give it another shot. Or, if the jostling around re-activated what yeast was in there, we might just go ahead and bottle it...
We used our only remaining carboy to rack the elderberry when the dripping stopped.


But soon, we'll be needing something to put this in:


It's a combination of blackberries and our own concord grapes. It smells divine. Madman's turning into quite the winemaker.

In between all that alcoholic goodness, I used up some apples to make a nice apple gallette:
And there's currently a loaf of bread baking. I think we have the best-smelling kitchen in Vermont today.

And in knitting news,
There actually is knitting news. (Hey, look! I remembered how!) I finished this hat. Just have to tuck in the ends and block it, then it goes in the For-Christmas-Gifts pile.
And I have a lovely failed swatch. Wicked Good Stepmother wants a scarf made from the gray and black alpaca. I found a stitch pattern I loved in Barbara Walker's The Craft of Multi-Color Knitting and cast on.
Too wide. And too loose. So I'm going to eliminate a repeat, and go down a needle size. I love ripping out failed swatches. Truly I do...

In the Land of Purple Fingers...

Madman got a line on some free elderberries. A woman we know, mother of a friend, said she had tons of them, and he was welcome to come pick as much as he wanted. (Her late husband had cultivated them. Word is, he would make wine out of anything. Literally anything. The results were generally excellent, though there was once an unfortunate experiment with tomatoes...)
Madman joyfully went over this morning and picked elderberries. And picked. And picked.
He came home with three grocery bags full. Woohoo!In an effort to avoid those previously mentioned purple fingers, we used forks to strip the berries from the stems.


We filled three 4-qt bowls. Three gallons of elderberries!! What bounty!

There were a few hitchhikers...

Several of those caterpillars turned up. And there was a Japanese beetle.


We mashed the berries. (The Japanese beetle was mashed separately.) Because what would be a better thing to make from elderberries than elderberry wine?


We used about half the berries to start a 4-gallon batch of wine. We won't be able to truly enjoy it until at least a year from now. Long range planning at its best.

I also made a batch of elderberry cough syrup for the coming winter. It smells so good, I can hardly wait to get sick...